In the blink of an eye Thursday on a conference call behind closed doors in the South Carolina Department of Commerce’s 16th-floor office, up to $8 million in taxpayer-backed incentives were doled out to some of the state’s largest corporations with no members of the public and only The Nerve present.

The money came in the form of port tax credits, which are income tax credits available to manufacturers using South Carolina’s ports whose volume increased by a minimum of 5 percent over the previous calendar year.

State law caps the total amount of annual port tax credits at $8 million. No specific amounts were revealed for any of the projects approved Thursday.